


who i was before

by hikaie



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: (mostly), Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Family Dynamics, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:14:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27572125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikaie/pseuds/hikaie
Summary: When he is five, his dad shows him how to make lavash.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	who i was before

**Author's Note:**

> My ideal Mirage headcanon is Iranian/French, so this started from that inspiration and quickly turned into a character study. This is... pretty maudlin but accurate to how I perceive Mirage, so heed that + the tags. Also, I gave his brothers names in here but they are mentioned very briefly.
> 
> [title inspired by [solace - animal flag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJvhziY8S4A&ab_channel=AnimalFlag-Topic). incredibly mirage song imo]
> 
> As always, enjoy.

When he is five, his dad shows him how to make lavash. It is something he has watched his brothers do every Wednesday for as long as he can remember- all of the elder Witts shoved into the kitchen, talking and laughing raucously and slapping the dough into thin rectangles. Elliott had a poor tendency to get underfoot, so he’d watched from the den, forbidden from entering the kitchen where his father tended the woodstove- especially installed, he’d be told one day, when they first bought the home. Witts loved to cook, and to eat. It was hereditary.

But Elliott always saw it as something of an annoyance. While his dad, so often away, spent a few hours with his brothers every week that he could spare, Elliott just watched. He almost came to hate lavash days, but the bread was always good, fresh and time-honed. Loved.

And then, one day, he is home sick (for real, this time,) and it’s just him and his dad in the whole house. Mom had been called away, and he can hear his dad pacing the length of the house from where he sweats out a fever in his bed.

“El?” His dad is in the doorway, and Elliott raises his face muzzily from the cartoons on the holo. “How ya feelin’ son?”

Elliott shrugs. His father crosses to him and sits on the edge of his bed, pressing one large hand to his forehead. “Your fevers gone down…” He adjusts Elliott’s hair, and the boy is secretly pleased. He had dad, all to himself.

“You know, it’s Wednesday.” His dad murmurs, and the delight Elliott had felt only a moment before comes crashing down around his shoulders. When his brothers get home, this will all be over. He tucks his chin to his chest, screwing his face up in frustration when his dad ruffles his hair. And then, to his everlasting surprise, his dad asks “You wanna help with the lavash?”

The afternoon finds them in the kitchen, Elliott atop the old step stool that his mom uses to reach the highest pantry shelf, his dad guiding him on how to shape the loaves. Next to his father’s, or even his brother’s, they would look pitiful. But his dad is smiling, says “Good job, Elliott.” when he slowly transfers the loaf to the singed peel, and even lets Elliott dip his flour-dredged hand into the container of sesame seeds, just to toss them with childish gusto across the dough.

“Alright, wash your hands.” His dad says, back turned as he slides the loaf onto the brick. Elliott is all eyes and no ears, watching the bottom of the bread bubble just slightly when exposed to the heat.

Elliott decides he loves lavash days. Elliott decides he loves to _cook_.

At sixteen, he is gangly, with the first hints of a patchy stubble coming to his chin. His brother only four years his senior had gotten a beard by his age, and all his brothers are broad. His _dad_ is broad- was broad.

So there is no one to give him direction on this. Somehow, some way, after striking out a dozen or more times, he’d landed his first date. Elliott spends hours pulling at his face in the bathroom mirror, and tugging on his facial hair as if to will it to grow. It just stings. He thinks about shaving, but remembers his oldest brother coming out of the bathroom with toilet paper clinging to bloody nicks, and he decides against it.

The house is empty. For any other sixteen year old with a girl coming over, this would be a dream, but Elliott Witt aches for the days of a full house. It has been years since lavash Wednesdays. It’s been over a year since any of his brothers were home. And when dad left, mom did too, in her own way. The Syndicate said jump, and she asked how high.

He ends up in the kitchen, with one of the handwritten cookbooks from the pantry, as he always seems to do when he’s feeling particularly down. When his date comes over- a girl from his math class, a whiz he’d asked to tutor him, and after three sessions of his joking and struggling, she’d asked _him_ out- she seems pleasantly surprised by his cooking abilities. She’s got long, straight black hair, approximately three million ear piercings and laughs at all his stupid jokes. Suffice to say, he’s smitten, and when she eats all of the pork chops and mashed potatoes on her plate, it’s almost better than when she kisses him goodnight.

Almost.

On Thursday, he opens the freezer and tries to decide which casserole to defrost today. They’re down to about four, now, and really, neither of them care about what they eat. It all tastes the same. Mom only eats if he reminds her, if he knocks down the door to her workshop and forces the plate in front of her. She’ll murmur a thanks or a hello and throw herself back into her work.

Her stupid fucking work.

Elliott is twenty-two and has a chip on his shoulder the size of his head. It’s been a month since it happened. Since they’d gotten the message. Every day has felt as unreal as the last. He’d flunked half his midterms and then he’d just stopped going to school altogether. His professors e-mailed him incessantly. He set up a filter to mark any e-mails from his school as spam. He put his phone on silent.

He didn’t cook.

They had friends. A few. Okay, Elliott had a lot, and when they inundated him with their food and condolences, he smiled and thanked them and closed the door in their face and added it to the collection. The dishes piled up in the sink, smeared with remnants of half-hearted lasagna and depressing shepherd’s pie. Once, his mom came into the kitchen for coffee, and looked at the sink, and hadn’t said a word to him before she had retreated back to her office. A MRVN started coming around to do the cleaning.

Two months in, he can’t stand the house any longer. He feels like if he stays in the empty, wide-open cavern of it that he’ll snap. At first, he tells mom when he’s leaving- makes sure she has water, and that she’s eaten. Occasionally reminds her to shower or sleep, if she isn’t already passed out at her desk. Covers her with a blanket when she is. Never cries or clenches his hands in anger.

But he does drink. _A lot_. He starts to hit every bar in the area, and then beyond, and he starts to play pool. He gets pretty good. When the place doesn’t have a pool table or a dartboard, he’ll pull out the trick deck or the weighted dice. Elliott starts to tell jokes again, and he starts to make a fair bit of money. He gets his nose broken. It’s okay. Everything is great.

“I’m going to Angel City.” Elliott tells his mother, four months out. “Just thought I should let you know.”

“That’s nice, dear.” She says, her hair haloed in light from her holo. He stands in the doorway to her workshop and waits for her to say anything else.

Elliott waits for a long, long time.

Solace feels _new_ when he comes home. He’s certainly new. He’d made a few enemies off planet, earned a few new scars, and had a few wild experiences on Dionysus. He never really thought about seriously coming back, but his mom needed him. For the first time in what felt like forever, he has a family.

She’s different, too. More like the mom he remembers when he was very young, a woman who smiled and stopped him just to touch his cheek or adjust his hair for him, who doted on the cooking he provided. At times he will go to bed at night, in his old, dusty bedroom, and the smile he wears feels genuine. But all good things must come to an end.

He has to take care of the bar now. She’d let it run itself into the ground, between working herself to death and her… condition. He can’t drink while he does it, either, or swindle people out of their money, or he’s not gonna have any clients. It’s hemorrhaging money from the start, and there’s never, ever enough to make up for it when anything they have to spare goes toward treatment.

And the thing is, Elliott is good. He’s a _fantastic_ bartender- has all the charm and the pizzazz, knows how to be a pseudo-therapist who’s all ears, no mouth, and he makes a damn good martini. He flirts with anyone that’ll flirt back. When patrons drink too much, he cuts them off, and when they wanna get shitty with the MRVNs, he kicks ‘em out. It’s kind of funny, the biggest joke of his life- his dream had been engineering, his passion had been cooking, but now he’s just a bartender. Just… a bartender.

It’s alright. He’s so tired most of the time, he can’t stop to think about how the house isn’t really empty at all. It’s full of ghosts that haunt him from the picture frames, from the kitchen window and the garden, from the mirrors in the bathrooms, from his mom’s face on her lucid days when she wakes and looks at him only to turn away, stone-faced and empty. No, he doesn’t think about it, not at all.

It starts as a solution to the bar- less upkeep for the MRVNs, more of a draw to the humans who want something to flirt with or yell at. And who _doesn’t_ want more of him?

On the late nights he gets home, instead of going to sleep he jimmies the lock to the workshop and combs through his mom’s files until he finds the schematics he needs, spends hours racking his brains trying to remember what he learned in college. He makes it work by bastardizing her tech to Hell and back, and it makes him feel good to do it.

Her lucid days are fewer and farther between, now. When he forgets the time and she finds him in there one morning, he freezes with fear and thinks she’s going to yell, to rage, but instead she crosses the room and curls her hand over his shoulder and hums at his rough sketches and smiles. “That looks good, Ell.”

It’s nice to hear his name once in a while.

She helps him perfect it, and he finds himself growing closer to his mom than ever before. He hates that it’s now, when she’s lost most of her mind, and together they’ve lost more than any one person should ever have to. He thinks back to those two years he spent away, drunk more than half the time and wasting his life in every seedy hole Angel City had to offer. Elliott knows he should have stayed. He wonders, if he had been there, had fed her and pulled her away from her work, if she’d be as bad off as she is now. He wants to be a better son.

That’s why he doesn’t tell her about the Games.

He always puts them on at the _Lounge_ when they’re airing, and it fills up in no time. The place gets certifiably rowdy watching them. Elliott? Elliott falls in love. It’s like that first time he got to watch his own lavash hit the brick and begin to brown, wildly transformative in the best way. He’s hooked, watching replays in his free time. He starts to tinker with his emitters, and in the back of his sketchbook he roughs out ideas for a Legend suit. Something flashy. Something _him_. It’s not serious. It’s just a way to pass the time, just a way to feel as alive as he hadn’t really felt in years.

Evelyn is lucid the day he comes home from a 3am shift and shoulders his way into the workshop. She’s tracing her fingers over the outfit and blueprints in his sketchbook, and his stomach is in his throat.

“Mom.” He clears his throat, pausing in the doorway to tremble. He fills it, now, the way he never could when he was sixteen and a late bloomer. “Why are you up? Can I get you anything?”

“Ellie…” She holds up the paper when she turns to him. “What is this?”

Yeah. What is this? An idiotic desire to steal her last son from her? A stupid pipedream, that’s what it is. Immature. A joke. He’s the king of bad jokes.

“Nothing, mom.” He lies, and Evelyn believes him.

“It pays really good, ma.” Elliott says quietly from beside her hospital bed. She’d had a little accident. Just a small one. She’s okay, now, but he’s starting to realize he can’t do this alone. He can’t keep up with all the bills. “And they can bring me back, so it’s not even a big deal, y’know?”

His mom is looking at him but not really seeing him. He can tell. It’s in the shadows in her face, the glimmer in her eye. Will she call him Emile today? What about Marcus, or Kian? At least she never calls him dad’s name. Not yet.

“Mom?”

She smiles at him, and his heart seizes so hard in his chest he presses his face to the scratchy hospital blanket to hide the way his eyes well. “If you wanna join the Militia, I’m not gonna stop you Marc.” Her hand falls to his curls. “They’ll make you cut your hair, though.” Her voice is full of humor, and Elliott hides his sob in a laugh.

“Yeah, I guess they will.”

The suit becomes a reality. He tears it his first game, during pre-qualifiers. Doesn’t have a cent left to replace it, so he just patches it up, and eventually it’s just another part of the costume. In the ring, he’s not Elliott Witt. It’s everything he’d ever dreamed of, as addicting as cooking, or magic, or regrettable aphrodisiac mushrooms. _More so_. He’s not a Witt, anymore, has nothing to live up to, and where that had hurt for twenty-six long, long years, it’s finally a relief. He’s Mirage, and he loves being Mirage.

When his first Legend paycheck hits, he cries. What? He’s not too proud to cry! And then the advertisement offers roll in. He takes them, takes any one he gets, everything from cereal to foot cream to whiskey. The money rolls in. He pulls back from the bar and lets the MRVNs handle it, hires an employee or two. People start to come in because _he’s_ running the place.

But mom just keeps getting worse. And no matter how many deals he makes, how many games he plays, how many painful deaths he puts himself through, there’s never, ever enough money. And when he’s twenty nine, tired and defeated, Elliott puts the house up for sale.

In the meantime, Mirage smiles for the cameras. He winks at the fans. He signs autographs and takes selfies. Mirage gets downed at Thunderdome and gets to watch, struggling for air and ears ringing from the frag that had exploded right next to his head, as the last place Elliott Witt had any connection to his family goes crumbling into the ocean.

And in the end, Mirage climbs out of the respawn chamber to do it all over again. There are still bills, after all. And Mirage? Well, Mirage doesn’t care.

Mirage didn’t lose anything at all.


End file.
